 Alright, let's go ahead and get started. Again, thank you all for joining us for today's webinar. This is the sixth in your eight-part series to complement your in-person training for the Texas Heritage Responders Team. And these programs are made possible through the generous grant funding support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Today's program is the conclusion of our little three-week marathon of webinars. We'll have a couple of weeks off and then pick up a session in May. I'm going to go ahead and pull over your webinar schedule here just as a reminder. If you end up missing any of these upcoming sessions, I will email you after the program with a link to the webinar recording. Simply email me when you've finished viewing the program and I'll mark it on your file. Before we begin today's presentation, just a quick refresher of technical notes. On your screen, you'll see several boxes including one labeled chat on the left-hand side. Of course, use this for asking questions and if you do post a question in the chat box, you'll receive a response from me. Any questions will be noted, collected, and then I will verbally ask them about our presenter at the conclusion of this presentation. Today, our presenter shared a PDF with us that is available in the files box at the bottom of your screen. Click on the title to highlight it in blue and then click the download button to save a copy to your computer. And with that, I'm very pleased to introduce you all to today's presenter. John Brandon is the owner and principal conservator at East Point Furniture Conservation. East Point is nationally recognized for providing conservation services to individuals and institutions that place a high value on their furniture. John is certified by the Smithsonian Institution to work on objects ranging from national treasures to family heirlooms. With 35 years of experience, he has worked on major collections of American and European furniture from museums, the US government, and private collectors. As an NHR team member, John has responded to large and small disasters including Superstorm Sandy and locally after Hurricane Harvey. With that, I'd like to turn things over to John for his presentation on furniture salvage. OK, thank you, Jess. And good afternoon, everybody. It is afternoon here in Maine. So it's my pleasure to talk with you today and I hope I can prepare you for salvaging furniture. My goal is to make this as practical as possible. And I think you'll find it straightforward. So right here in the beginning, I'm going to show you a couple of pictures of an historic village museum that experienced a flood. And I've been involved in several disasters. But this doesn't mean that I know everything there is to know. But what it does mean is that I have experience. And what that experience has taught me is to be ready for anything. And when you run into a situation where you don't know what to do, you can consult with a colleague if you need advice and call somebody on the phone. And that's just what our team leader, Dennis, is doing here during our response to the Houston flood last year. We ran into some taxidermy that none of us knew anything about. So Dennis called a friend who happens to be a taxidermist. So it's not unusual to find yourself in unfamiliar territory. So before we really begin the presentation, I'd like to start here with our first polling question for everybody. In fact, there's going to be four questions and we'll just ask them one right after another. And this will give me a better idea of our audience and who I'm talking to. So it looks like we have a good representation of conservators. And the next highest one is other. So conservators have a lot of experience handling objects. And I think this will be useful for everybody. We're going to talk about how to handle objects in particular furniture. The next polling question would be, Jess is running that for me, so here it comes. Have you ever repaired or refinished a piece of furniture? Aha. Okay, it looks like a number of people have touched furniture before. At least tried to repair it or refinish it. And I like the last category that says wish I had. Well, you just may get your chance. Hopefully it won't be during a disaster. The next polling question, what type of furniture do you have in your collection? So I'm presuming that everybody is associated with some kind of a museum collection. A bit of a more complicated question. You have to think about what's in your collection here. Looking like most people have historic furniture, old things, not too many modern, some veneered. Most of what we'll talk about today will be geared towards older aged furniture with veneers, made of wood. So this is going to be useful for a lot of you in many ways. Josh, just a quick note about that. Unfortunately, people can only select one answer. So I realize there might be some cases where people had multiple Olivia just noted modern and historic. But yeah, great to still get a sense of that. Okay, I'm pulling up the last question now. Have you ever used linseed oil or lemon oil on furniture? Don't be afraid to say yes. I have done that myself. And so I'll say just a little bit about this. You shouldn't be doing that. Linseed oil was an old tried and true kind of way to maintain your furniture, but it's not a good thing. And even these newer oils like lemon oil or even pledge over-the-counter kind of furniture polishes are not good to be using on a furniture collection. They create more grime than anything. And there's better ways to care for your furniture. Mostly what I tell people is to leave it alone. Don't do anything. Just keep it clean with a dust rag. So okay, we can stay away from the oils. All right, we'll pick it up from there. And so just to be clear, and I'm sure everybody understands this, that salvage is the initial response to a disaster aimed at saving the object. We're not talking about conservation treatment here. And that will come later on when the salvage operation is over and the disaster is behind you. You're probably familiar with this list, and many more items could be included here. In my experience, the most frequent kind is an event that involves water. Even if it's a fire event, there is usually a heavy water component because of the fire department blasting everything with their water hoses, or the sprinkler system in the building has soaked everything. Most of the furniture you encounter, the primary material will be wood, but it often includes other materials. So you may have to call on your training for those types of materials, even though you're dealing with furniture. Here's one example of a non-wood piece of furniture. While there's probably some wood underneath the seat that holds the frame together, the chair is primarily leather and horn, plus the upholstery foundation. Upholstery foundation materials include everything but the show cover, in this case the leather. So the foundation gives it shape and provides strength for sitting, and we'll talk more about upholstery in a moment. So wood is a relatively durable material. It falls somewhere in the middle in the range of durability of objects. And we can prioritize furniture based on how it is constructed, such as having veneers or the materials that are attached to the furniture, such as gold leaf or upholstery. And just a reminder here, all of these slides, all of that information is contained in that furniture salvage handout that you can download. So this is already written down for you if you just take that handout. Since wet events are the most common, let's cover that first. Wood is a hygroscopic material, and there are consequences for that. And that means that it will absorb water. So these are before and after pictures of a flooded church interior. The water level rose to about halfway up the windows, so it was very deep water. And you'll notice in the right hand picture that pulpit that's laying on its side, that used to be up near the front of the room. And this is another picture of a flood aftermath inside an historic schoolhouse. The furniture floats around in the deep water, and then when the water recedes, the furniture drops in place wherever it is. You'll notice two desks in the front did not move because they were bolted to the floor. And so here's my pointer here. These desks right here are bolted to the floor. And in fact now I see a third one right here. So I mentioned that wood is hygroscopic, and that means it will absorb water. And we need to be aware of this when we encounter wet wood. This picture is showing you the end grain of three different boards. I'll get my pointer here again. And so this is the end grain of the board here. All three of these boards started out the same width, and that was about 10 inches from this line over to this line. Then the bottom board was fully saturated with water. The middle board has about 12% moisture content, and the top board is oven dry and has essentially no water. And what's happened is the wood has changed dimension. So when wood takes on water and gets wet, it expands, and when it loses water, it shrinks. And in this case, we have about a half an inch difference in dimension just because of the water. Things to look for when you run into wet water. It's going to take on the weight of the water it absorbs. High humidity will activate mold growth. Vineers and joinery will delaminate because of water-soluble adhesives. And veneers can become deformed, either when they get wet or as they dry out. And as we just saw, wood will expand when it gets wet, and this can cause doors and drawers to get stuck shut. Blanching of coatings means that water has penetrated into the finish and caused a disruption of the finish, which impairs the transparency of the coating, and it usually turns white. I'm going to show you some examples of these conditions, and then we'll look at salvage procedures. So here's an example of a phone operator switchboard in a wooden cabinet. This piece was almost completely submerged in water, and the waterline, as you may have noticed, came right up to here. So again, this was deep water. What you see on the surface as a hazy white layer is a combination of blanched coating and active mold growth. This is an extreme case, but you'll run into varying degrees of this. Here's an example of active mold on the legs of a table, and you may be more familiar with seeing mold like this. This is an example of a veneered panel on a chair leg that's delaminating as a result of water exposure. Another example of veneered furniture. This is a desk, and this one is to the extreme, with every inch being covered with veneers. Here's that same desk showing one side in raking light, which demonstrates how extensive veneer delamination can be. These are parts of a table that are detached because of exposure to water. So it loosened the glue, or the adhesives. So we have some structural pieces and some veneers, and when you encounter loose elements, they should be gathered up and labeled and placed in some kind of a container for safekeeping so they don't get lost. You might be tempted to place them in a plastic bag, which is standard museum practice for those of you in collections care. But if the items are wet, it's not good to enclose them in plastic because it won't allow them to dry out and it will promote mold. In this example, I'm showing the pieces stored in a drawer that's part of the table with an identifying label. A small cardboard box could work just as well. When you need to move an object that has damaged veneers, you'll need to take some precautions before wrapping it in padding or a blanket. The front of this clock case is covered in a variety of different kinds of veneers. In this case, a water pipe in the ceiling burst and sprayed water on these veneers. Before we look at the damaged veneers, I want to say a word about moving objects like this. In the right hand photo, you can see that it's wrapped fairly snugly in a furniture pad. Be aware that tall case clocks like this should be disassembled before moving. In fact, they're built such that they're intended to be disassembled. The bonnet slides forward and off the case, and then the clockworks can be removed, which includes the dial and the pendulum and the weights. On the right, you see that the bonnet has been removed, and the backboard is sticking up at the top of the blanket. This is the backboard. It runs all the way from the top to the bottom. It's one continuous board. It lends rigidity to the case, and you can feel comfortable carrying a tall case clock by handling the backboard. Now let's take a closer look at the bottom panel, where most of the veneer damage occurred. Here's a closer look at that panel. You may notice a couple of horizontal cracks. I'm going to point those out. These cracks are along here, and another one here. These are very old cracks, and you can tell that because the cracks are dark, and they have darkened with age. If these were new splits, you would expect to see fresh or light-colored wood along the edges of the cracks. Remember that this entire panel is a thin layer of veneer glued onto a secondary wood substrate. The old dark cracks are stable, and by that I mean the veneers are still well adhered to the substrate. What has happened here is that the substrate would split, not necessarily because of this water event. It's just because this is a 200-year-old clock, and the wood developed a split. The substrate developed that split, and then being very thin, the veneer followed the substrate and split at the same time. Also notice the top right corner and the bottom left corner. I'm talking about right here and down over here. These are veneer losses, and the pine wood substrate is visible here as a lighter-colored wood. These things that I've just pointed out are not of great concern in terms of wrapping the object in a pad, and that's because these areas are stable and still well adhered. But when we view this panel from a different angle, you'll notice a condition that should be a red flag in terms of wrapping the object. So here you can see delaminated, tinted, puckered, or whatever term you want to use to describe these fragile veneer segments, and they've become detached from the wooden substrate. They are definitely unstable, but by some miracle they're still in place. And here's another section a little further down the panel, and it's not hard to imagine the danger and the damage that can happen if this is wrapped in a padded blanket. The fabric of the pad can easily catch on the protruding pieces and the sharp edges, and the veneers could get ripped off of the object. The solution to this is fairly simple by using a barrier layer between the object and the blanket. In this case, glassine paper is used, two or three layers of it actually, but anything will work that is smooth and will slip across the surface without catching on the veneers. The glassine is wrapped around the area that needs protection, and here it's tucked under the lower edges so that no tape or attachment is necessary. Then it's wrapped in the blanket and is now safe to move. Here's an example of joinery that is separating. Even old repairs can come apart. And again, this is usually due to water-soluble adhesives that get wet. And in case you haven't seen it, I'm talking about this area right here. Right around there, we have this long split, and down here is a dowel joint that has broken and come apart. This was an old repair, and the water from the water event penetrated that repair and the glues released. This is what blanching looks like. In this case, the whole table got wet, but it was quickly dried using towels, which saved most of the finish, except the spot where a book was laying on the surface. Water seeped under the book, and the book was never moved. So the water was trapped there for a long time. And this is a close-up look of that blanched area. I want you to notice the paper along the edge of the blanching right along here and down here at the bottom. So that paper is still stuck to the tabletop, and this is a caution to be careful when you separate objects from each other that have been wet. Even if they have subsequently dried out, they could still be stuck together. I don't recommend that you attempt repairing the blanched area. That's a tricky maneuver that should be left to a conservator. Beyond drying the piece, there is no urgency in fixing the blanched finish. So let's talk about salvage actions. Here are the most important actions to be considered. If the furniture is in a wet room or is exposed to the elements, then hopefully you can locate a dry storage area where you can take the furniture for drying out. If you don't have a dry location, then dehumidifiers can be used to dry out a room. I can't emphasize enough that wet furniture needs to be handled carefully. It will be heavy, and you need to be careful about handling loose joinery and veneers. This is an example of a dry storage area where wet objects have been moved. You'll notice the stacks of chairs, which is not the best thing to do, but you won't always have the perfect dry storage area, so you make do with what you can in terms of space. As I mentioned earlier, have helpers to move large objects and make a plan for safe moving. By far, most damage occurs to furniture during moving and transportation, so make sure everybody knows and understands the plan for moving an object. In this case, the bench was disassembled into two pieces before transporting. This was a particularly large object that required many hands. This is the upper section and the lower section going down the stairwell. Perhaps you can't move objects to a dry location for whatever reason, or maybe only the floor is wet at the site, in which case raising the object off the floor using blocks may be the most expedient solution. And by the way, this is a good strategy for normal storage of objects to prevent them from getting wet in a minor flood event, especially if they're stored in a basement. And then air circulation is important to dry the furniture and to discourage mold. Air circulation speeds up the drying process. Don't use hot air. You may have seen commercial salvage companies using hot air blowers to dry out a wet house. Those are not good for furniture. They dry the wood way too fast, which promotes distortion of the wood, deteriorates finishes and the glues, and causes rapid shrinkage of veneer and gilding. The idea is to dry the wood slowly to prevent distortion, cracking or splitting. And upholstered furniture deserves special attention because you're dealing with a combination of wood and lots of textile materials. Besides drying the upholstery, the next most important thing here is to decide whether to save the upholstery or to remove it. This is usually a curatorial decision, and they should be involved in the decision-making. It might be obvious, but I want to remind you that once you remove the upholstery, it's unlikely that it will ever be reinstalled on the object. It just isn't technically possible. But removing it can speed up the drying process. So here's a case of an historic house that had a water event because of a burst pipe. And this group of upholstered furniture did get soaking wet. And so we're looking at the collections person and the curator here discussing the upholstery and deciding what to do about it. It turns out that this furniture was owned and used by a famous Civil War hero. And this is the original upholstery. We're looking at the actual silk fabric that his wife picked out. This is the original workmanship of this beautiful tufting on these sofas. And so there's a discussion here about are we going to try and save the upholstery, dry it out, or do we want to just remove it and make the job easier for drying out the furniture. And here's another shot of that same, a piece of furniture from that same suite. This is an armchair. And you can see the water staining that's occurred on this silk upholstery. A close-up of the same chair. So it's pretty badly stained. But we were still in discussion about whether to leave it on the chair or to remove it. And then we decided we wanted to look underneath some of these trims that go around the arms. So we removed a portion of the trim and this is what we found. This beautiful bright blue color underneath the trim. And so it became evident right away that these silk fabrics had undergone severe light fading. So in this situation it was decided to remove the show covers. That means just the silk fabric. And we were going to try and save all of the foundation materials. So we removed the trims and the silk cover. And, well, before I speak about this slide, I'll just talk about drying out that furniture. It was kept in a room, a dry room with many fans circulating air for about three weeks. And a solid three weeks of circulating air helped dry out that upholstery. It actually dried it out quite well. So we can still work on the chair frame even though it's got its upholstery foundation material still in place. The foundation includes the springs underneath the seat, the webbing, the horse hair stuffing, the cotton batting, the muslin covers. And you'll notice that the original tufting was preserved. The tufting are the wells that you see in the back of the chair. Try and point those out. That's a well of a tufted part. And then we have several of these wells and the same thing on the seat. So in this case, we lost the silk covers, but we saved all of the original material and all of the original workmanship of the upholstery foundation, which is considered valuable. And this is that same chair after new covers and new trims were put in place. But in some cases, it may not be advisable to try and save the upholstery. These chairs were in a flood and are from a theater and are used as props in productions. The property manager for the theater advised us that the chair frames were worth salvaging, but she didn't want to save the upholstery and, in fact, they regularly re-upholster them depending on the production they're used for. So in this case, the upholstery was considered expendable. And in that case, you can get out your sharp knife and cut away the upholstery. And this is a big help in allowing the wood to dry out. So without the upholstery, the dry time is reduced to about a week instead of three weeks. I'm going to talk a little bit about removing mold. This is starting to get into the realm of treatment, but it's pretty straightforward, and I think it's within your capacity to attempt if you have the time and the inclination. So let's look at some examples. First, you want to let the mold dry out. If you tried to clean mold or wipe it off of a surface while it's wet, all you're going to do is smear it across the surface. So we're looking at the bottom of an old wooden table, and all of these white spots are mold, active mold growing on there. And first, you can remove as much as possible using a HEPA vacuum and a brush. And again, it has to be dry for this to work. But a vacuum doesn't always remove all of the mold spores. In which case, you can resort to wiping the mold with a cloth dampened with solvent. What solvent, you might say? Here's where I want you to pay close attention because it really matters. In this case, I'm wiping the bare wood, and it's unfinished wood. And in that case, the solvent should be a mixture of water and alcohol mixed in a ratio of one to one. The alcohol will kill any remaining mold spores on the wood, and the dampness of that rag helps to wipe up the residue. And this is what you may see in your rag after wiping the bare wood. This is dirt and grime that's come up on the rag, and it's nothing to be really concerned about because you're going to wipe up any accumulated dirt. Here's an example of active mold on the table legs, the same table legs we saw earlier in the presentation. And this is a different situation because they are on, the mold is on a finish. And we cannot use the alcohol solvent here because alcohol will definitely damage a finish. So in this case, you can wipe the surface with a rag. Well, let me back up for just a moment. First, you would want to vacuum this surface with a HEPA vacuum, which I've already done here, and you can still see there's a lot of mold still on the surface. But you can wipe the surface, as I'm doing here, with a rag dampened with plain mineral spirits. And again, that dampeness with the mineral spirits helps wipe up the mold and remove it from the surface. And I'm just talking about your hardware store variety mineral spirits. It doesn't have to be anything fancy. This is from my Ace hardware store. And for the alcohol and water mixture, I mixed my own. It's a one-to-one ratio. And again, it's just your average denatured alcohol that you can get at the hardware store. Or you may want to use isopropyl alcohol that you can get at the pharmacy. And in this case, it already came diluted 50% with water. So that was very convenient. And it works just as well as making your own mixture. Here's another example of mold on furniture, particularly on this leather seat. Some of you may recognize this as a Gustav Stickley oak chair. And there's a paper label from his workshop on the underside of the seat. And here I am vacuuming the mold using a small brush in one hand to sweep the mold toward the vacuum nozzle. The nozzle itself never comes in contact with the chair. And I remind you that the mold must be dry before you do this. And notice that the vacuum hose is draped over my shoulder. This prevents the hose from knocking against the furniture. This is the brush I use for that particular chair. It's just a cheap little brush. And I've trimmed the bristles to an angle so that they come to a point. And I made them a little shorter so that they're a little more stiff. And they did a better job of flicking the dust out of the crevices of the mold. So here's a picture before I cleaned it and during the cleaning process. And you can see that the mold was primarily trapped in cracks in the leather. And that's why that little brush and the vacuum were so useful. This is the paper label that I told you about. And it's in pretty poor condition. I'm going to go at this with a brush or directly with a vacuum. But I do want to remove that mold. And in fact, it was pretty successful at it. That's it after it was cleaned. And this is the way I went about it, is to get a piece of window screen. And this is fiberglass window screen instead of metal window screen. It's a plastic or fiberglass screening. Protected with blue tape around the edges where I cut the edges of it. It's about one foot square. And now I can bring the vacuum nozzle down to the paper and vacuum right through the screen. And the screen holds the paper in place so that we don't lose any of it. And so that's the technique. This isn't on the actual label, but that's the technique using the vacuum nozzle with the screen. So now let's cover a fire situation. The main thing here is careful handling to prevent further damage. And this is a client's home that had a house fire. And luckily enough, there was very little damage to, or there was damage, but there was no, very few things got actually burned. The flames you see are shooting out of the kitchen. The rest of the house suffered smoke damage. And this is what you'll see in the aftermath of a fire. It's always a mess. And not only is there smoke, soot, and ash, but everything is soaking wet from the fire department. And as I was preparing for today's webinar, I realized that dealing with fire is similar to dealing with a wet event because it includes drying, vacuuming, and air circulation. What I want to impress on you is the first item on the list to avoid touching the surface of soot and ash. That can cause a real problem when it comes time to clean the object. So if you need to pick something up, try and get it from underneath or from a non-presentation surface. I'm not going to go into cleaning soot and ash very far because it's, again, it's tricky and I think it's best left to a conservator. Or possibly a conservator could consult on your particular situation to develop the best cleaning protocol and then train some volunteers how to do it. But it can be a risky treatment. The one thing you can do is remove smoky odor using activated charcoal deodorizers and by circulating the air. This is an example of a carbonized wood sculpture. It's a 4-foot tall sculpture and in terms of salvage, there's not a lot to be done except don't touch the charred wood if you need to move it. As you can imagine, carbonized wood is fragile. After salvage, a conservator can consolidate the wood and restore the finish. This is a small painted box that was in a house fire and has soot on the surface. So again, you want to be careful how you touch something like this. This was cleaned using a dry eraser technique and dry cleaning methods are usually best because wet cleaning can drive the soot further into the surface. And just so you can appreciate why this is important, this is a close-up view of an aged paint surface showing an alligator texture. And you can see how easy it would be to trap excess soot in the texture of this surface and that's why careful handling is important. I want to give you an idea of how smoke and soot can penetrate an object. This is a cabinet with a fitted interior and the outside doesn't look too bad for having been in a fire. And when you open it up, it still looks pretty good, even cleaner than the outside. But soot tends to settle out on horizontal surfaces and can penetrate inside closed cabinets. So to finish up, I'd like to show you two examples of how a disaster plan can make or break the recovery from an event. I'm mainly aware of this because I assist organizations with disaster planning and I've seen how it makes a difference. So I think it's worthwhile devoting just a couple of minutes to this. This is an historic farm museum and its main components are the structures and their contents. This small organization had a rudimentary disaster plan in place. The plan said that if the barn ever caught fire, bulldoze the back house. And for those of you not familiar with New England architecture, this is called the big house, then the little house, then the back house, and the barn. And the back house is the structure that connects the barn with the rest of the house. Bulldozing the back house would break the connection to the main house. And this was a conscious decision to sacrifice a portion of the building in order to save the rest of the house and its contents. Unlucky for them, they did experience a raging barn fire but the plan was executed and they successfully saved the main house with all of the contents. And you can see where the back house was bulldozed. So the barn disappeared in the fire. The back house disappeared with the bulldozer but the little house and the big house were saved. And there's a little more to this story. From where I took this picture, behind me is a chapel on the grounds. And this is the chapel. It's about a hundred yards away from the house. On the night of the fire, they carried out the second part of their plan, which was to hand carry collection items from the house over to the chapel. So they organized a human chain and moved everything into the chapel. So this is a success story and it relied on having a disaster plan, as rudimentary as it was. The not so good story happened at this village museum. The collections are stored in the historic structures and in the warehouses. Just on the right-hand side of this picture you'll see the front of some of the historic structures. They had no disaster plan and the grounds were flooded a few years ago and the contents of all of the buildings, including the warehouses, got wet. And they too had a bulldozer. And while their intentions were good during cleanup, the bulldozer was used to push the collections out of the warehouses and into this pile. So instead of having water damaged collections, they ended up with a pile of trash. And so you do strange things when you're in the grips of a disaster. And here's a case where a disaster plan would have helped them think through this scenario ahead of time. So that wraps up my comments for today and I'm happy to entertain questions. Great. Well, thank you so much, John. We did have a couple of comments come in in the picture that you shared of vacuuming the mold off of a chair. Jeff and Jennifer noted that you weren't wearing a mask. Was there a decision to not have PPE as a part of doing that work, or what can you tell us about that? Right. Yeah, so that picture of me vacuuming without a mask, that was not in a disaster situation. That was actually in this storage area of the museum where the chair is stored. And it was a good environment with a good HVAC system. And I do wear PPE when I'm in a disaster situation and there's lots of mold and particulate flying around. But it would be as if let's say you had a little mold on a chair at home in your living room. Would you don all of your PPE to clean it up? It was that kind of a situation. Low risk, I would think. I'm glad to see that people are paying close attention in the health and safety presentations that we did. I am too. Very good. Whoever asked that question. Olivia asked, are there additional procedures in the salvage of a pulstery wet with sewage water? That was a big issue after Harvey was just looking at the contamination in the floods. So what can you say about that issue? My first response would be to get rid of the upholstery. Again, you'd have a discussion about that with the curatorial or whoever is the decision maker on that. But I don't think you want to mess around with that. If you want to try and save that upholstery, it definitely needs to be washed and cleaned. And to do that, you have to get it off of the furniture. And if it's going to be worth anything after you get it off the furniture, it means you have to take it off very carefully. And that's time consuming. That takes a lot of time. So you have to be willing to, number one, wear all of your PPE while you're removing all of that upholstery. You have to have the time and the inclination to do that. So if you can fit all of those things into your work schedule while a disaster is going on, then that's the way you could go about it. But I would suspect that if you're in a big disaster situation like that where things are covered in sewage, is to remove it, cut it away, and throw it out. Sorry to say. We had a question come in from Mary Beth as well, wondering about when you shared in that slide the image of furniture elevated with wood blocks. Wondering if the wood on the floor might absorb water and cause the piece to not dry. Yes, yes. Very good question. Yes, that wood will absorb water. So if it sits there long enough, the water will eventually migrate through the wood block and start to touch the bottom of the foot. The primary thing those blocks are doing, they're keeping it out of standing water so it's not sitting in an inch of water. If it buys you time so that things are up out of the actual wet water and you would eventually want to move it off of those block woods to a dry storage area. But this is a situation where you may not have a dry storage area immediately. And yes. If you can use something besides wood then that's all the better. Wood is inexpensive and easy to cut to length. It's just, it's in an emergency situation it's an easy thing to do. Great point. Yeah, go ahead. Very good. Time to give me thanks for that answer. We had another question from Jennifer as well, asking how long can she leave mold on historic furniture before cleaning it up? They're in the midst of recovery process and have some other priorities. So the mold is dry on that furniture now. So how long do you think they can leave it be until they need to address it? Right. Not immediately. I would take care of your other priorities. I don't have a definitive timeline for when you should actually get to it. So I don't have an answer for that. If it's dry and if the furniture is in a dry environment then that mold will eventually start to go dormant. It'll still be there. Still be on the surface. Just sitting there. But as long as it's in a dry environment then I would say take care of your other priorities and get to it when you can. Great. Well thank you. And I see, Steve is typing a question now. If anyone has any other questions I would encourage you to drop those in the chat box on the left hand side there. Obviously furniture is a collection item that I would expect most of you have. So it could be a range of topics you all might want to discuss here. I see a couple of people typing. So while we're just waiting for those answers to pop up or those questions I should say to pop up I am going to go ahead and just pull over the survey link so I don't forget it. So again as with past programs if you just click on evaluate the webinar to highlight it in blue and then click the brass 2 button that should take you to the survey monkey to evaluate today's session. So we had another question come in from Olivia wondering are there additional procedures in the salvage of wood, wet with sewage. So kind of follow up to the other question about upholstery that is contaminated by sewage. What would you consider when dealing with wood that's been affected by sewage water as well? Right. I would wash it. I wouldn't be afraid to wash it. It's already been wet once. So I would wipe it down with more water and even a mild soap. I think you want to use people tend to use too much soap and that's what you want to be careful of. A few drops of soap works wonders and use clean rinse water. So like I said the furniture has already been wet. Use more water to wash it off with some soap. Yeah, great point. I think that's important to remember in a lot of these different materials we've been discussing about, you know obviously it depends from material to material but to not be afraid about rewetting objects when necessary because if they've already been exposed to water to get them in clean water might be an important step in the process. So Olivia is wondering again to follow up how far do you think the contamination can penetrate into wood? Oh wow, what a great question. Okay, so I've wondered this not about contamination but I've often wondered how deep does a finish penetrate into the wood? So in my well let's back up a little bit. You can soak a piece of wood in a bath of water and the water will penetrate 100% through the wood. So if contamination is carried in a water or a solvent, if it's in that environment long enough it'll go deep into the wood. But let's say for instance, just for an instance you have a bare piece of wood and you take a soaking wet washcloth and you just flood the surface with water and let it sit there for a minute, two minutes or even five minutes let it sit there and just stay soaking wet and then you dry off the surface. So I've tried this. I've done this actually as a little experiment and then I cut the piece of wood in half so I can see how far the water penetrated. It's not very far. It takes a long time for that water to penetrate. And it also will depend upon whether it's going in the end grain or the side grain. The end grain of the wood that's where all of the open vessels are in the wood grain. And it will soak up water much quicker much more like a straw. The end grain is in the water. That's soaking up water fairly quickly and much more deeply. But if it's from the side grain it goes very slow. Kind of a general answer to that question but get the full range. That's very interesting, yeah. I've heard that researched before. Yeah so then Olivia was also wondering she says some people think that you can grow deep inside of wood. Do you have any comments on that? Yes I do. If there's moisture in there the mold will grow to it. It does. Again I've worked with some very wet wood that was wet for a long time and when you cut it open the mold is all the way through. So it can travel up and down the vessels of the wood grain even if it's in the center of a tree a 2 foot thick tree. Wow, Steve Pine he asked a big question. To finish answering Olivia's question I think mold grows in wood if the wood is wet. If the environment is there the mold will grow. I'll read Steve's I think it's more a reply to some of the previous comments. The original poultry is treated differently in the reproduction or non-period fabrics then having the fabric documented will often be helpful in finding replacement of poultry. Foundation profiles of original will also be important to document. He says in a pinchill take a photo of the entire repeat of the pattern but his goal in the worst case is to cut out a full repeat of the pattern in lengths of trim sufficient for buying replacements. I'm going to try to capture the useful documentation. Thanks for adding that Steve. I was going to see if we could check with Steve to see if he had a microphone on his computer. If you want to chime in with anything try to drop your line separately Steve but I'm not sure if you saw that. If you do have a built-in microphone I can connect that if you'd like but feel free to jump into the chat box Okay so Mary Beth is asking if the wood has mold deep inside is it possible that the mold will reappear at a later date if it's not completely removed? Well yes you have probably heard this in your other webinars or training that mold spores are everywhere you can't get rid of mold spores in our environment and it's just waiting for the right environment to come to life and so if mold is deep in wood but it becomes dormant it can also become active again all it needs is the right environment so the answer to that question is yes it can reappear at a later date and then Olivia I was just wondering if you had any additional protocols or suggestions for handling wood that is moldy deep down so all the way through are there anything different that we should be aware of? No this is going to be common sense but when you're working with objects you can only work with the surface you can't get down inside the wood to do anything you want to get it in an environment where it becomes stabilized and stop the mold from growing and that's the best you can do you can't open up the wood and remove the mold thank you Steve Pine thank you for that on the upholstery that was very well put and very good to know about documenting upholstery before you remove it the profiles all of that stuff is so important again, as I said and as Steve well knows, once you remove something it's lost and if you haven't taken a picture of it you're going to forget what it looked like save pieces of the old fabric so that you'll always have them in your archives even if it's not on the object okay great and then yeah, Mary Bath was just wondering too so a previously waterlogged piece should remain in a dry environment forever if you want to address that I guess dry meaning ideal environmental controls okay, there is I'm going to answer this in terms of a furniture collection, but when you say waterlogged you can also get into the realm of archeological waterlogged wood and the protocols for that would be completely different which I cannot speak to but if a piece of furniture became completely waterlogged I would want to dry it out and I would want to keep it in a dry environment and when we speak about a dry environment what I'm talking about here is a relative humidity of 40 to 60 percent just that general guideline of keeping your furniture at 40 to 60 percent relative humidity environment so that's what I would do with furniture as I said, archeological waterlogged wood is a different story and I think the answer could be completely different okay, you're an archeologist and she understands that okay, I'll bet that's why you asked that question I'm suspecting that as well great, well I realize I accidentally lost the surveilling so I'm just going to fold that back over again like I clicked on something that made it disappear so there's that back if anyone was wondering where it went thank you for such great questions and discussion after it's really an interesting thread that we brought into the conversation here so I didn't really see too many other questions coming in so I'll just wrap things up by saying thank you to everyone who participated and thank you to John for sharing your wisdom with us today and as I mentioned we have a couple of weeks off thank you all for this last three weeks of joining us every Wednesday we have a couple of weeks and then we pick back up in early May and looking forward to seeing you all then thanks again John okay